Superman Returns

Nearly 20 years have passed since the Man of Steel was last impersonated on screen by the definitive Superman, the late Christopher Reeve, and back in 1987 everyone agreed that the preachy, soporific, underpowered Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was the last fizzle of the series. It was inevitable, however, that after 9/11 America's greatest superhero would come back to protect the threatened city of Metropolis. Significantly, Superman Returns specifies an absence of five years and it hits the screen running, or rather triumphantly marching, to John Williams's stirring 'Superman Theme'. The new film is dedicated to Reeve and his late wife, Dana, who had both demonstrated superhuman courage after his tragic riding accident in 1995. The producers have found in Brandon Routh an ingenuous, all-American actor who also has the smoothly contoured, planed-down looks of a comic-book hero and is as unknown to us as was Reeve in 1978.

During his five-year absence from the Earth (and his alter ego newspaper reporter Clark Kent's absence from his job at Metropolis's Daily Planet), Superman has being trying to discover his roots in outer space and see if anything remains of the planet Krypton from which he had been despatched as a babe-in-arms before it exploded. Having found nothing out there, he returns to the Kansas farm of his widowed earthly stepmother, Martha Kent, played by the 82-year-old Eva Marie Saint, who is cast no doubt to echo her relationship with Marlon Brando in her first movie On the Waterfront. Brando not only figured as Jor-El, Superman's real father on Krypton in the first Reeve movie, but is represented here in the form of a hologram reprising a homily from the first moments of that earlier film. Martha is herself homiletically inclined and tells her son, 'Clark, the universe is a big place. You don't know what's out there.'

Meanwhile, Metropolis is going to the dogs, and Superman's greatest enemy, mad scientist Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), is out of jail and hatching a plan to destroy America, starting with Metropolis itself, and replace it with a new land mass in the Atlantic from which he'll rule the world. What is just as bad for Superman is what he finds when he puts on his horn-rimmed specs, adopts his milquetoast persona as Clark Kent and returns to his job at the Daily Planet. The love of his life Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), who of course doesn't know he's her beloved Superman, has won the Pulitzer Prize for writing an editorial called 'Why the World Doesn't Need Superman' and has a four-year-old child. The subject of her Pulitzer piece suggests a hubristic world that has lost faith in its guardian and saviour. The child, we rapidly infer even before he demonstrates prodigious powers, is actually Superman's son - shades here of the central secret of The Da Vinci Code

Metropolis is an oddly timeless world, or a mixture of worlds, a city where the print media still rule, Art Deco is the chief architectural style, the men dress more or less in the fashions of the 1930s, yet a new space shuttle is about to be launched from the top of an airliner. Forty minutes pass before Superman strips down to his action skivvies, revealing, if memory serves aright, a more conservatively dressed figure. The cape is now less bright red than maroon, and the rest of the figure-hugging leotard is a tasteful dark azure rather than a comic-strip electric blue. Fortunately that wonderfully vulgar kiss curl (did Bill Haley consciously borrow it?) is firmly in place. In his first spectacular stunt he brings down the fuselage of a large aeroplane to rest in a crowded baseball stadium, demonstrating his disturbing ability to exert phenomenal power without resorting to any form of leverage.

The quirky humour that informed the first three Reeve pictures, especially the third one, derived largely from Richard Lester, who superintended the first and directed the other two. There is little of Lester's light touch in this sombre new movie. Whereas Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor was a heavy-handed comic turn, Kevin Spacey's is camp, sneering, violent, malevolent. The film's director, Bryan Singer, is fascinated by traditional concepts of good and evil. In his best picture, The Usual Suspects, a satanic universe is conjured up from everyday chaos. In Apt Pupil an American high schoolboy embarks on a dangerous relationship with a fugitive Nazi. In his two X-Men pictures, which also have comic-strip roots, Singer examines the use and abuse of superhuman powers given to social outsiders. In his hands, Superman Returns becomes a Manichean religious allegory.

Superman has sometimes been wrongly thought of as reflecting some kind of Nazi debasement of Nietzschean philosophy. The comic strip was, however, created by two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, reflecting their fantasies and anxieties at the height of the Depression. Moreover, that acute cultural observer, the Jewish-Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, attributed great significance to Shuster being originally Canadian. The Daily Planet, he pointed out, was originally the Star (modelled on the Toronto Star), and Clark Kent 'is the archetypal middle-class Canadian Wasp, superficially nice, self-effacing, but within whom there burns ... a would-be avenger with superhuman powers'.

Superman Returns seems an essentially Christian film. Superman comes back to earth at a time of great crisis and is virtually crucified by Luthor, using shards of the deadly green Kryptonite crystals as nails. While he lies dying in hospital, his mother, Martha, is among the grieving crowd, while inside the sick room his son looks reverently at the Superman outfit lying on a chair as if it were the prophet's raiment, the martyr's shroud or the hero's armour. Something resembling a resurrection follows, accompanied by heavenly music, and a nation seems to be at ease with itself again.

But did I enjoy it? Well, quite. It's too long, but then so-called 'event movies' always have been. Made in the United States and Australia (the Reeve pictures were made in Britain), it's a handsomely designed picture and the special effects, which have been farmed out all around the globe, are what are usually called state-of-the-art, though they're never breathtaking. The film is solemn when it attempts to be serious. It lacks the sombre imaginative power that Tim Burton brought to Batman and Batman Returns, and the wit, narrative drive and dark vision with which Christopher Nolan revived that franchise in Batman Begins last year. Of course, ever since a seafaring uncle gave me a subscription to various American comics during the Second World War (hiring them out and selling them became for a while my chief source of income), Batman has always been my favourite superhero, though when I entered my teens, I fantasised about being pursued by Lois Lane rather than hanging out with Robin.